Beeper

When Dr. Richard Avery's son is kidnapped while attending a professional convention in India, he must endure a 24 hour nightmare. Supplied with a beeper containing a text display through which instructions are sent, a desperate Avery is ordered on a wild and dangerous journey in a foreign land.

This is the basic set up of Beeper, but get ready for a jet ride because Beeper is non stop thrills and action. Just think, what would you do if someone you loved was kidnapped? Scary as heck, but it happens all the time in foreign countries. And all people can do is hope and pray, unless you're brave like Dr. Avery. He's a kick ass hero! Check this film out!

Dr. Richard Avery (Ed Quinn) is a recently widowed doctor who decides to get his son Sam with him to a medical seminar in India. He believes that he will have a chance to get closer to the young boy. There, during his presentation, the boy is kidnapped from the audience. Two cops (the Indian cop Kumar and the American cop Julia Hyde (Joey Lauren Adams)) will try to help him. The only means of contacting the kidnapper is through a beeper. Dr. Avery will lose the beeper and will look for help with the drug dealer Zolo (Harvey Keitel). This is a low budget movie. However, this plot in the hands of a better director and cast would lead to a great movie. The screenplay is very interesting and keeps the attention of the viewer until the last scene. There is no 'clichés' in the story and you will be certainly interested to know what will happen next. Unfortunately one of the main characters (the young boy Sam) has a terrible acting. It deserved a best actor child in this important role. Harvey Keitel has a big belly in the present and had much better acting than that in the past. I like Harvey Keitel, but in this movie, him, together with some Indian actors, disappoints the viewers. Another comment: is it common in India to have a foreigner cop in their police force? In this movie, Joey Lauren Adams is an American cop in an Indian police department and I found this situation very unusual. In the end, I liked this movie and I believe that fans of action and exotic places will have a good entertainment. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Sequestro de Sam" ("The Abduction of Sam")

I wanted to see a thriller with Harvey Keitel and I was fooled, I had to swallow a Bollywood s..t. I hate Bollywood films. It is indeed an exceptional Bollywood, it has no silly songs and dances. Otherwise, the action and almost all the actors are Indian. And it's not great, everything is predictable. At minute 29.07, when the kidnapper fires the pistol at the teddy bear, shots are heard like from a pistol with a silencer, but the pistol doesn't have such a thing. The most embarrassing scene is the final one, when the father grabs his child by the hand from the kidnapper, the blonde policewoman. No stars!

Beeper is simply put, a mediocre movie. It places our SWM hero in a strange and exotic society and from there it tries to develop a thriller, but failing on multiple levels. No exciting pictures of Indian society, no logic in many of the actions, police work is horrible, sets are awful - you get to see some footage of a Boeing 747 the main characters are supposed to fly, but inside it looks like in the 50's.

And what the heck is Keitel doing in this movie? Did he owe Jack Sholder a favor? Was desperate for some money? Got a free trip to India? Anyway, even he can't save this one. Oh yes, and look for the car chase...in The Hidden, Sholder got to play with Ferraris, here he works his car chase-skills on some antiqued cabs. Cheap, but entertaining. Still, go find The Hidden, it's much much better.

...about what exactly it takes for a film to get made. This may be the worst picture I've ever seen. If you like poor acting, especially poor child acting, wait for this to make its TBS world premiere and set your VCR's. The film quality was horrendous as well. I kept thinking to myself, "So, when's Shannon Tweed's character gonna be introduced?" If you've got 6 bucks in your pocket, treat yourself to a good sandwich and count the days 'til that TBS premiere. I feel sorry for Harvey and Joey Lauren Adams, because I think they're solid actors. But even they couldn't save this from sinking into a bottomless pit. Just my opinion.